Irreal

Dale Karp wanted to publish his activity log and notes so that others could see them and he could view them remotely. To do this, he set up an automated publishing pipeline using Emacs and Org mode. The idea is that he defines a “publishing project” in Org and invokes Emacs via systemd to run the export function on the project.

It’s a nice setup and one you may find handy if you want to regularly publish some Org files. He doesn’t have to do anything other than update his log files and they automatically get published to his GitHub Pages blog once a week. Head on over to his blog for the details.

Ben Elijah over at Ink and Ben has posted a nice set of Org and Emacs resources. Folks are always asking for basic tutorials and other information on how to take advantage of Emacs and Org mode. Elijah’s list is mostly about Org mode but he does include some Emacs resources on the grounds that you need to know at least a little Emacs to use Org.

The other day, I wrote about blogging with Hugo and Org. Part of that post involved how Diego Mundo worked around the fact that Hugo expects its input in markdown so that he could write his posts in Org markup. Xuchunyang commented that as of version 0.19 Hugo also supports Org mode natively.

It turns out that the Org mode integration is handled by the goorgeous module. Over at A Scriptor’s Notes there’s a nice post on how to build Hugo and goorgeous from scratch. This may be attractive if you want to keep up to date with the rapidly evolving Hugo ecosystem. The post takes you through everything you need to do to install and build from source. You’ll need to install the Go tool chain, but you don’t need to know how to program in Go.

There’s also a complete build script so once you’ve done the initial install, all you have to do is run the script. It’s probably worth your while to investigate this post if you’re using Hugo to blog.

One of my favorite applications of Org mode and Babel is demonstrated by Howard Abrams’ post and video on what he calls Literate DevOps. The basic idea is that he documents his work in an Org file complete with the actual code that he uses. What Babel makes possible is that he executes the code from inside Org mode and the results are automatically added to his Org file. In the end, he has a complete record of what he did along with the results. That makes the process easily reproducible and he can send to file to a colleague wishing to build on his work or needing a go-by for a similar project.

Vincent Bernat has taken Abrams’ DevOps idea and applied it to network operations. He calls it netops. If you’re working in network operations and want a nice way of documenting your work, take a look at Bernat’s post and the accompanying three videos. As with DevOps, everything you do is documented along with the code and results.

If you aren’t a network engineer you probably won’t understand everything he’s doing but you can still follow his process. My only complaint is that the videos have no audio; Bernat just types in what he is going to do. I find videos like that harder to follow but they’re still definitely worth watching.